Things are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a universe that seems, now more than ever, as a energized and tilted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An invisible force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the grasp of crowds. "An element is at work, stealthily, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way."
Key Puzzle and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which picks up where the previous book concluded. This is, according to many, the author's final foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating world he first revealed three decades past, with the release of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose terrain maps on to that of the real world, but whose chronicles diverges and shifts with ours; where the humans look and think and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, essences in animal form; where the heavens are teeming with sorceresses and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and tea is consumed, and mature academics carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a toddler in the first volume, the introductory book with which Pullman began the series, is now a adult: still clearly the spiky and determined protagonist of the previous installments, but older, more sorrowful, warier, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her split from her daemon, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in pursuit of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he epitomises as her "imagination"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across the continent and into the Caucasus, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the beginning, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's controlling power, and Pullman's deliciously chilling representation of strict, administrative evil – is under new leadership, and flexing its muscles. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his recently acquired authority to extend the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who saved infant Lyra to security along a overflowing Thames as an 11-year-old in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to learn more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the rare and precious essential oil which manifests somehow to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from Central Asia. The extract is seen by some as a tradeable commodity, by different parties as a scientific or esoteric miracle, and by further factions – the extremist "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an insult that must be eradicated. The issue of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or preserved is escalating in importance.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's decisions, and her future, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the realm
In its predecessor, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In the conclusion, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's movements and her fate are revealed to be inextricably entwined with the fate of the realm. Her individual mission to rejoin with her daemon and regain her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider war with an oppressive regime which, as such authorities always have, is striving to stifle autonomy of thinking, creativity and expression: all the inner, rebellious ways in which people can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The story opens with the finding of a set of unusual cracks in the structure of the world's atmosphere: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. A particular window seems to be the origin of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its leadership, labels these openings as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict rationalism and revert to intuition, nevertheless, her belief that these locations must be preserved – that their meaning and their value is somehow crucial – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the vision, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between purity and knowledge is prepared.
Story Tempo and Protagonist Growth
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
